The Big Smoke

We moved house last month. This was partly to get away from the guy who lived in the basement, a Booker-nominated novelists with carefully nurtured and oh-so-artistic neuroses that would manifest themselves in a series of particularly unpleasant ways. And it was partly because we had the opportunity to move into a real house, one with its own entrance and internal staircase, the sort of house your parents live in and a defining moment in my London life, exemplifying the transition into adulthood.

‘This is a real London house,’ my Mum said when she saw it. At first I thought she was just being nice because she knows the way to my heart, but it turns out that she was quite right – it is a real London house, measurably as much as spiritually.

In ‘London: The Unique City’, his classic book about London design and architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen writes about houses just like mine: ‘From railroads intersecting the suburbs of London we see interminable rows of these swarthy little houses with all their protruding little kitchen-wings.' He includes a picture and plan of one of these houses, reproduced above. It looks a lot like mine.

There is a reason for this 'interminable' consistency in London housing, and like most things in the country, it is to do with class. Rasmussen tells us that in London, because the class system ensured people of the same social strata would invariably live alongside each other and away from people of different classes, it is ‘possible to standardise domestic houses: as people living in the same street have the same requirements all the houses can be absolutely uniform.’

But this is what intrigues me about my street – all the houses aren’t uniform. At one end there are grand five storey double-fronted detached houses, which would have been for the very rich and at the other there are two-storey workmen's terraces, with every possible permutation in between. In fact, it is entirely atypical of Rasmussen's standardised London street, because here there would have been unavoidable mixing of the different social classes.

From somewhere, I’d picked up the notion that this curious mix was because the street was originally constructed by Victorian building companies as a way of showcasing their different house designs during London's rapid expansion in the middle of the nineteenth century: developers would then come down and look at a range of different types of houses – three-storey semi-detached, four-storey terraces – and choose which one they wanted when constructing new streets in the growing suburbs.

Sadly, it seems I made this up. When I put my theory to somebody at the local historical society, they told me: ‘This is the first I’ve heard of a suggestion that these houses were built as exemplars of different housing styles. The street was built over quite a long period and differences in style are probably because of changing markets. The largest houses were built first – at the end of the 1850s, early 1860s. They were designed for the middle classes with living in servants. In the later 1860s, after the coming of the railway to Herne Hill, the area began to attract the skilled working classes. This was the market for which the later and smaller houses were designed.’

Oh well, it was a nice idea.

Incredibly, Rasmussen also knew the exact width of of my new house - 16 foot 6 inches. He writes, ‘the common little house is only sixteen feet six inches broad. It has probably been the ordinary size of a site since the Middle Ages… but it is difficult to get information as to how typical houses were built in former days.’ After reading this, I went home and measured the front of my house and he was right. Now everywhere I look in London, from Brixton to Holloway, I see 16 foot 6 inch house fronts. Try it for yourself.

So why is this? For an answer, I turned to English Heritage’s new photographic collection ‘Lost London’, in which Philip Davies explains why London’s houses of a certain era are all exactly the same size. He writes of ‘a secret ingredient which conferred an innate harmony on the city, and which influenced everything from the layout of an entire neighbourhood to the size of a window pane – the Imperial system of measures.’

Davies’s continues. ‘Neighbourhoods were laid out by surveyors who used acres, furlongs, rods and chains – measurements which had been in common usage for marking out arable land since the ninth century. An acre was the length of a furlong (660ft) and its width was one chain (66ft). For shorter lengths a perch, a pole or a rod were used. There were four rods to one chain and a London workman’s house had a frontage of one rod – 16 ft 6 in – so entire districts were created based on endogenous proportional relationships.’

For those who find London’s overall sense of scale overwhelming, this internal and very visible consistency might at least provide some comfort.

My favourite thing about my new house, though, is not the comforting sense of conformity it provides, but the small metal-covered hole it has on the doorstep. This is a coal hole. Rasmussen says, ‘Through little round covers the coal can be shot into the vault, so that the coal dust is not brought into the house.’ I had never noticed London’s coal holes until I was introduced to one – not literally – by Matt Brown of Londonist, and I’ve since discovered there is a rich source of coal hole coverage out there on the internet – check out Faded London or Jane’s London for extensive examples. Aren't they cute? Now I really do have London on my doorstep.

To make a living as a tour guide, you need to do one a day. Over the course of a year, I only do about one event a fortnight . This suits me. However much fun they can be I do find them tiring. I’ve never had any theatrical training and an average walking tour is in essence a two-hour stand-up performance on the streets of London with all the delights and drawbacks that implies. I cover the range from corporate (works dos and promotional) and community groups to educational and personal (birthday parties, stag nights) as well as free tours linked to my own projects. The only ones I don’t do are tourists around the West End or Ripper walks in the East.

The latter in many people’s minds are synonymous with London walking tours. Up to 100,000 people a year go on them and many of the walks are, I’m told, very good. When asked why I refrain, it’s usually enough to explain that my grandmother’s family are from Bradford and people see the connection. But I‘m also not interested in delivering a third-rate version of what others do well when I could provide a first-rate version of something I’m interested in.

I was recently commissioned to do a walk of Greenwich which meant starting from scratch with all the research, scripting, testing and plotting that entails. At a conservative guess it meant over fifty hours work to deliver a two hour tour. Looked at that way the rewards are not great, but if ever anyone is foolish enough to ask me to do another Greenwich tour (contact details are below!) it would now only take a few hours to rescript and rearrange. Nothing, in that sense, is wasted and in well trodden areas (for me the riverfront from Tower Bridge to Vauxhall) it is easy to create new walks out of old, not only in terms of stories but also finding good stopping places. Good, in the this context, means quiet, off road, preferably sheltered and, if possible, with a good view.

London’s fundamental history doesn’t change, but the way it is viewed is constantly evolving, so I found myself a few weeks back in the supremely ironic position of taking a group of journalists on a pub crawl down Fleet Street. Coals to Newcastle surely? A few years ago the idea would have been ridiculous, but twenty years after Fortress Wapping that lot had no more knowledge of Fleet Street than anyone else. They’re my favourite audience too: mixed, metropolitan and confident – I do like an element of interactivity and have been known to give over the street at times, such as when someone in the crowd turned out to be the last landlord of the (closed-down) pub I was in the middle of telling a ghost story about.

Fortunately he backed up what I’d said because there is always the danger of a better-informed, or worse, confidently ill-informed person taking the tour, who will insist on stressing a popular urban myth as fact. Tour-based dissension is usually easy to handle and can be talked through between stops with the person in question; outside interference from drunks or those with attention seeking disorders can usually be brushed aside. Confidence and a certain pigheadedness are helpful as is an awareness of the streets, including any building works that block the route and potential traffic hazards. While you want people transported by your words you don’t want them strolling under buses.

The ideal walking tour should have good stories, a couple of wow factors (on the journalist one showing them the Old Curiosity Shop) and a bit of willful alleyway-based disorientation so people get lost in spot they think they know.
The architecture of London should work for you and after a bit of practice you can read London by its streets, so if you get stuck you can just talk about street names. Anywhere with a Maiden Lane for example is a former red light area. Or, as I pointed out on the stroll down the Fleet Valley towards the Black Friar pub with its lovely interiors, this is where you can find both Seacoal Lane and Newcastle Alley, named after where the coal from the north-east was landed off the once navigable River Fleet.

Chris can be found at F&M Walking Tours. A map of the tour locations is here.

Lucky Jim spends five hours in a Mayfair strip club, the new home for the VHS Video Basement squatters.

A great story from Paul Slade about ‘Lobby Lud’, a real-life competitive version of 'Where’s Wally' that was done by the Westminster Gazette in 1927. It’s a fascinating read.

There’s also some fantastic London history from Another Nickel In The Machine, who follows in the footsteps of Martin Luther KIng's assassin James Earl Ray. Ray fled from Memphis to Canada to London in 1968. He was eventually spotted and arrested with a false passport at Heathrow while trying to leave the country.

An Indian expat falls in love with London. I love the touching naivety that ‘I came here expecting regimented routine where things never go wrong, where buses always run on time.’ He’s since learnt better. Welcome to London!

Finally, a lovely video from John Rogers’s Islingtongue blog of a wander in the countryside around Loughton. You should also check out John’s film, ‘The London Perambulator’, featuring Will Self and Iain Sinclar, which I hope to cover in more detail soon.